Paella, Climate, Detroit, and Adaptation

When I tried learning Spanish a few years ago, during welding school, I learned about Spanish food, and did additional research on it. Turns out, Spanish food is Gaelic food, with local substitutions. This is important, because it lead me to learn that Hot Pot, in Japan, is ALSO Gaelic food with local ingredient substitutions. The Gaels were a sea going people who found lands to settle, but since they knew how to sail, they kept at it. This was 2000+ years ago, so the language they speak, Gaelic, while still taught (and sung, Gaelic ballads and opera are fantastic when done properly) in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, was once spoken in both the Baltic and Mediterranean at every Greek and Roman and Etruscan port. Most sailors were fluent in it, possibly part of the culture. If time travel ever becomes a real thing, fluent Gaelic will be key in the old world. More than Latin.

Paella is basically a slow cooked rice dish with chicken, seafood and spices, mainly chilis and crocus stamen (saffron). As I don't have the smell receptors for saffron, I miss that part of the dish other than the color it imparts. It takes a long time to cook it down, usually around 45 minutes, so when you order Paella at a restaurant, get appetizers and drinks and such and enjoy the good conversation while you wait. As rice came from China, and Chilis are from the Americas, Paella didn't exist until after both Marco Polo and Columbus did their trips and returned. People sometimes forget that. I run into staggering ignorance about history when reading fan fiction or historical fiction. This also means that the roman empire had no chilis, neither did the Byzantines or the Chinese or Thais. No curry in India until the chilis got back with Columbus. Oh, and the Black Death had several large outbreaks, not just the last one under the Mongols in the 14th century. People forget these things, they don't get taught, and far too many people choose not to look it up. Even Middle Earth has potatoes and tomatoes, which are both from America. Tolkien just didn't know. A spot of his ignorance showing.

Its a bit surprising that alleged science sites choose not to investigate all the data on millions of years of pre-human climate change related to the ice ages. That they don't talk about the ice age starting because the Indian sub-continent impacted Asia, raised the Himalayas, and disrupted the monsoon air currents, causing glaciation in Tibet and North America, and Switzerland and Norway. Those disruptions turned into glaciers that moved a foot a day, which in a million years is a million feet and when you start thinking in geological terms, those are important. My own extensive research into glacial advances of the Pleistocene found evidence of glaciers getting all the way to the Florida panhandle and Texas panhandle, up in Dallas. No obvious remainders left, but happened just the same. We're still dealing with post-melt drying, which is why the Sahara is so weird and the Middle East so violent. People there are too dumb to leave, and keep fighting over the sand. I say leave them to it.

The Pleistocene started 2.6 million years ago and gave us our glaciations, which came and went several times. Then the Milanokovic cycles kicked in (how the planet faces the sun) and warming jumped global temps 10'C 19,500 years ago and the ice started to melt. There is current debate in geology as to whether this is still the Pleistocene rather than the Holocene, since the ice will come again. Nothing we do will stop it. Not even burning coal. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more algae blooms we'll get processing it back into O2, and the more land plants will grow, since the C in the CO2 makes plant materials like wood. We can't control the Milancovic cycles. It's ORBITAL MECHANICS. They don't have anything to do with gas fractions in the atmosphere. Only crazy people disregard orbital mechanics to blame people for global warming. There are LOTS of crazy people, however. And crazy people in great numbers vote for their crazy, since a vote is just as good as reality (that's sarcasm).

Really, Global Warming today is both a twenty thousand year old reality and a mistaken suicide cult by aging Baby Boomers and schizophrenics and con men preying on them. I think the big worries will end with the Boomers end. We are an adaptive species. We can also MOVE if things get too difficult. Building on the sea shore where hurricanes strike is massively stupid, and ignoring the data that the Little Ice Age caused unusually predictable weather patterns for 5 centuries, a relatively short time in the geologic scale where I live and think, means the Boomers are just turning the metaphor of their own deaths and trying to con the young into dying with them, into panicking with them. Cherry picking tragedies like New Orleans and Bangladesh as examples? LOL.

Most Pacific Islands are sinking. Look at the line of seamounts leading WNW from Hawaii. That volcano is responsible for all of them, and all of them were once on the surface. They sank again when the volcano moved, or rather the Pacific plate moved over the stable hot spot volcano. Hundreds of millions of years old, that volcano. That sort of time scale thinking is something only geologists and astronomers bother doing, so it doesn't bother us, but it freaks out ignorant normals something fierce because it means facing their mortality every single time they consider how long it runs, and that panic turns them religious, and religious people have NO BUSINESS IN SCIENCE. If I were in charge (of education standards), I would test college entrance examinees for religious preference and deny them entrance into scientific major programs if they're not atheists or agnostic. They can do fuzzy things which don't matter. Be English or Art majors. There's no point allowing already ignorant and biased people into disciplines which require an open mind and ability to accept reality rather than hide in fiction and lies by their forefathers. This is why progress is so slow.

I don't like the Baby Boomers, as a group. Individually they have done many good things, and individually they can be good people on specific things, but overall they've voted to bankrupt the future for their own personal gain and I can't forgive that. Nobody should. We'll let them rot on their fallen ideals and complain endlessly how the past was better before they spent all the money and hocked the future for a bottle of wine and a really great party in the late 1960's. Not cool. And they mock us for our low wages and poverty and ignorance, things they specifically caused. The Boomers are very pretentious, but the cows are coming home to roost and their money is getting very shaky.

Look at Detroit, city of the future. Look at what it has become under ideal Baby Boomer management. $17 billion in pension plan debt burden, and no way to pay it because Pensions were always a Ponzi Scheme. The new guy pays for it until there's no new guy to pay for it. What is what they've got now. Only a fool would start a business there, because he'd be taxed to the gills to pay that $17B debt, while dealing with no reliable utilities, high crime (murders!), and no visible police or emergency services, even the street lights are off at night. There is no reason to be there. The city of Detroit is a post-apocalyptic wasteland. That's the future these Baby Boomers gave us. And the govt wants to throw $200B (multiply all govt estimates by a minimum of 4, and 10 is much more likely) at it in hopes the problem will go away. This is not a good plan. Better to bulldoze it and leave it as a monument to stupidity that it really was. The only good govt is local, because they have to face the consequences of their decisions locally. It's not a distant Someone Else's Problem. It's local, and real people with faces can get in yours when you do the wrong thing. The Boomers have lost touch, and they aren't guiding the ship anymore. They're steering onto the rocks with their suicide cult of global warming, their mismanagement of the currency, their job destruction of jobs through global trade. These are terrible things they've done, and my generation is left to clean up the mess they made. Not cool.

I'm glad I'm thinking beyond gripping the past till it chokes like the Boomers. Instead, I am resetting my goals to actual achievable aims, and attempting to teach others to let go of false dreams and join reality today. If you can keep your bubble car going, by all means. When it breaks and there's no parts, use what you can find until you can't. And then get a scooter so you can keep working. Deal with lower wages, avoid debt, reduce your needs. Keep adapting. We don't need people who can't adapt to reality anymore. They won't be saved. There is only adaptation or death. Not choosing is choosing.

Also it is high summer and I washed my car. There is every chance a thunderstorm will make it dirty again, despite this being California in the summertime. We're expecting 100'F today, leading to Thunderstorms possibly tonight. Its one of the cooler things about living here. Those storm clouds are really beautiful as the heat drives them higher and higher into the sky.

Thunder storm brewing on a warm summer day above Donner Pass.

Enjoy your weekend.